Judge denies witness in dad's murder trial

TROY - Separate rulings from a judge rejected possible witnesses from both sides in the murder trial of Adrian Thomas on Tuesday, before more than two weeks of testimony came to a close.

Closing arguments are expected this morning, after which the case will go to the jury to weigh conflicting medical testimony and decide if Thomas is guilty of second-degree murder in the death of his 4-month-old son Matthew.

Judge Andrew Ceresia denied the defense the opportunity to call Dr. Richard Ofshe, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied police interrogations for two decades and was to highlight coercive tactics used against Thomas.

After hearing in a juryless courtroom Monday from Ofshe and prosecution counter-expert Paul Cassell, a University of Utah law professor, Ceresia sided with the latter. The judge agreed that there is little scientific consensus that specific interrogation techniques are likely to lead to false confessions and noted that empirical data was "conspicuously absent" from Ofshe's testimony.

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Thomas's confession, given to police in more than nine hours of interviews viewed in full by the jury, is the only piece of evidence directly linking the 27-year-old defendant to the death of his son in September of 2008. In those interviews, Thomas admitted to slamming the child down on a bed in frustration three times in the days before the infant's hospitalization, among other instances of rough treatment.

He has since recanted that confession, telling the jury from the stand that he lied and told police what they suggested to him had happened.

Several of the tactics Ofshe would have highlighted were used by Sgt. Adam Mason in his interviews of Thomas, but Ceresia deemed the expert's testimony unnecessary not only for lack of a scientific basis but also because the jurors saw the interviews themselves.

"The idea that a person may admit something he or she did not do ... is not foreign to the average person," the judge ruled. "The jury knows every tactic used by the police because they watched those tactics being used. They know every lie the police told because they saw those lies being told."

Despite never being heard by the jury, the testimonies of Ofshe and Cassell cost the county - through the offices of the district attorney and public defender - roughly $16,000, not including travel expenses.

Ceresia also rejected the prosecution's hopes of calling a Child Protective Services employee to testify that Thomas told that worker three days after his arrest the same story he told police, in that instance ostensibly outside of potential coercion.

First Assistant District Attorney Arthur Glass sought to highlight that admission during the trial, but objections by Thomas's public defender Ingrid Effman was sustained by Ceresia. A hearing would have been required in order to call that witness, the judge ruled, and one was never requested.

Mason was the only one to take the stand Tuesday, testifying on behalf of the prosecution as he did two weeks ago. The former detective countered the defendant's claims on the stand that he was forced to the station and made to stay in the interview room under threat of arrest to either himself or his wife.

The jury's deliberations will focus heavily on medical testimony given by both sides. The prosecution's doctors have said Matthew Thomas's death - ruled a homicide by Medical Examiner Michael Sikirica - came from head trauma that caused bleeding in his brain. The defense and its experts have contended a blood infection capable of causing internal bleeding killed the infant.

The possibility of sequestering the jury during their deliberations was discussed by the attorneys due to the heavy media coverage the trial has received, but Ceresia decided against it.